Media FAQ

The conspiracy theorists are at it again. A governors' review looks into the corporation's coverage of the Middle East, reporter Barbara Plett is admonished for saying that she had shed a tear at Yasser Arafat's funeral, and BBC director general Mark Thompson has been to the region for face-to-face meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Therefore Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin cannot simply be moving to another job after five hard years covering one of the world's nastiest and most enduring conflicts, she must be being "withdrawn".

This is just plain wrong. The BBC would normally move foreign correspondents every three to four years - subject to having suitable new postings for them. This chain of moves began when Panorama offered Africa correspondent Hilary Andersson a job. She delivered them outstanding coverage of Darfur and showed clear potential as a long-form storyteller. So Panorama hired her. This opened up an attractive opportunity for Guerin, who had been in discussions about possible moves for some time (she had after all been there longer than is usual). Caroline Hawley moves from Baghdad to replace her - from the green zone to the green line, you might say.

A much more important question concerns coverage of Iraq. That the abduction of the SAS soldiers in Basra came as such a complete shock indicated our lack of understanding of the real situation on the ground, which itself flows from a lack of first-hand journalism. The fact that the use of white phosphorus by US forces in Falluja was brought to light by an independent journalist and a Italian filmmaker, in spite of the presence of an embedded BBC journalist, must pose serious questions about what kind of job the corporation is able to do in Iraq.

Why has RDF bought Wark's firm?

The short answer is mainly because it's Scottish. In paying as much as £12m for IWC - the indie partly owned by Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark and her husband Alan Clements - RDF is gambling on getting a share of the BBC's new commitment to out-of-London production. In a recent speech BBC director of television Jana Bennett promised that the BBC's spending in the "nations and regions" would rise from £600m to £1bn by 2012. Beneath this headline figure lay another more specific commitment to double production in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. However, to understand why this is potentially such good news for bigger independent producers in the nations and regions (of which IWC is one of relatively few) and such bad news for some in-house producers, one has to see it in the context of other, apparently unrelated, commitments made by the BBC.

In order to avoid being forced to take a higher quota of independently produced programmes and to create the appearance of a more meritocratic commissioning system, the BBC has created the so called Window of Creative Competition (Wocc). The idea is that independents be guaranteed (as now) 25% of commissioning once certain programme categories like news are excluded, and that in-house producers be guaranteed 50% with the rest (25%) being left open to creative competition between all parties. The BBC maintains a mixed ecology of production with programmes supplied both in-house and by independent suppliers and creates a fairer and more competitive commissioning system. So far so good. But because the big battalions of in-house production - like soaps and long running serial drama - hoover up so much of the BBC's 50% in-house guarantee, the consequences of creating space for the Wocc are more significant in other programming areas. Now add on the effects of the significantly increased commitment to spending in the nations and regions and you can see why IWC - with its background in factual and factual entertainment programming - looks like such a good deal for a London-based indie like RDF that needs growth to keep investors happy.

Is Campbell right about TV news?

Alastair Campbell's claim that increasingly opinionated television correspondents obscure the facts is at the very least a bit rich coming from him. Maybe he is looking for a new career in TV entertainment?